New Managerialism: The Impact on Education

Abstract

With the rise of the neo-liberalism as a system of values, there is an increasing attempt to off-load the cost of education, health care and public services generally, on to the individual. Allied to this, there is a growing movement to privatise those areas of public services that could be run for profit, including higher education.

New managerialism represents the organisational arm of neoliberalism. It is the mode of governance designed to realize the neoliberal project through the institutionalising of market principles in the governance of organizations. While Taylorism and ‘scientific management have been employed extensively to for-profit businesses for many decades, what makes new managerialism ‘new’ is the deployment of managerialist principles in both public sector bodies (Lynch, Grummell and Devine, 2012), and, increasingly, in non-governmental organisations (McCrea, 2014).